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Star Giants: Looking for feedback on Pastel W.I.P.

Hi guys, I am finishing up a 4X3 pastel drawing for a client and after having sprayed the first layer of fixative, I'm about to go over it with some color and make it better. I have an overdrawing and a colorstudy along with a photo of the piece in it's relatively current form. I wanted to ask for any input from any of my fellow art makerers to see if there's anything about the color or the posing I could fix.

I thank you all very much for your input, and I look forward to reading it.

At this stage it is a bit too late to ask about posing. Once you've committed to color, you've committed all that.

If you are uncertain about color or posing at this stage, better stop and do some more exploratory sketching before you invest more time into a picture you'll end up reworking. You can do both compositional studies and color thumbnails. Then you can decide whether to start over or come back to the old version.

Your color study is quite different in color from the WIP photo. It uses colored line, and the photo shows a rather monochromatic yellow drawing everywhere. Is that intentional, or is the photo quality that bad, or did you hope to colorize some lines later?

I am rather puzzled by the bright grid lines in the photo. Is the grid a part of the composition, or did you merely use it to transfer the sketch by squares? If the latter, then you ought to consider making it less prominent in your next piece, and using an intermediary sketch at 1:1 scale instead of the grid. Or a projector. You won't be able to remove a grid like this completely, and you will either have to erase it, damaging the support, or deal with it blending into the subsequent color layers. You've pretty much killed any chance to have uncolored support showing, too.

Thanks for the input Arenhaus. I actually use a LOT of fixative, so I find the medium of chalk remarkably forgiving when it comes to making changes. Since I'm a bit of a novice when it comes to this medium, I don't know if there are consequences to using too much fixative, so I want to be teachable. You said that doing a 1:1 sketch is preferable to using the grid system. Would you then put a coat of chalk on the back of it and transfer it onto the canvas? I did that with my self portrait and it went swimmingly. I'll need to do that for my next piece (this time I didn't have time to do that as I was doing it at a public event). If you do need to do a grid, what color of chalk do you usually use that blends in easily with other colors? Sorry for all the questions, I just want to get better at this since this is what is getting me work. I thank you so much for your feedback! I really appreciate it.